Saturday, December 4, 2010

Today!

Yesterday the 12th annual Fashion Conference began in New York. I had the pleasure of hearing the great Mitchell Owens speak about the great style icon Pauline de Rothschild. Just a little over a week ago I was at the opening of Hamish Bowles' Balenciaga Spanish Master exhibit at the Queen Sofia Institute and Hamish spoke about a beautiful matador inspired bolero that had belonged to "le plus perfect" Pauline de Rothschild. Balenciaga had shown the bolero in black with an ivory faille ball gown but Mrs. de Rothschild had something else in mind. Mon Dieu! Balenciaga did not change anything for anyone anytime. Except for Pauline. And she was right. She had the bolero and its oversized pom poms made in the pink of a toreadors stockings and wore it with a black satin romper that suggested the matador's knee breeches.

Image from Balenciaga Spanish Master, Hamish Bowles

Mitchell Owens yesterday said that a stylish woman is who you are originally and not who you are surgically. He said that Pauline had a rich inner fantasy life and though her references were not literal (she did not literally wear a matador's breeches but a Balencaiga inspired version) and would have been obscure to anyone but her, how she dressed herself reflected how she felt and what she was reading. And that my friends is true and unique style. With a little help from Balenciaga, Schiaparelli...

Today the fashion conference opens with Anna Sui and then the photographer Lincoln Schatz, Preservation and Restoration with Sara Reiter from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, yours truly from RARE vintage and Jan Reeder from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute with Koos Van Den Akker on our panel and the conference closes with Hamish Bowles. Should be a heady mix of all things vintage and fabulous.

I tweeted some pics from yesterdays conference which you can see here. @rarevintageNYC